As any other public state library, it keeps and recollects the Italian editorial production, both on a local and on a national level. It preserves and improves its own historical collection, acquires foreign books depending on the needs of its own users and on the specificity of its collection, documents its own belongings, provides bibliographical information and ensures the circulation of documents.

Its name and its location can be mistaken: actually the Library does not legally depend on the University of Pavia; however, since the beginning, the two institutions have always cooperated with one another.